Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

One of the blog marketing sites, DoshDosh recently suggested that it may be possible to get into the top 100 favourites on Technorati relatively easily.

Whilst we’ve all been beavering away in building up links back to our blogs, it will take a “while” to get to the top 100 linked to blogs as number 100 is currently sitting at over 3000 links. On the other hand, it would only require just over 100 200 people to favorite us to get into the top 100 favorited blogs which certainly seems in the realms of possibility.

Why bother though? Well, being in a top 100 list of anything is almost certain to increase the traffic on the blog and indeed quite likely to increase the number of blogs linking to us for that matter.

Anyway, if you’re interested in exchanging favourites in this way you can start the ball rolling by clicking

and letting me know that you’ve done it in a comment to this post (quote your Technorati username so I can confirm the link).

A link back in a post would also be appreciated and reciprocated.

Those also offering link exchange are listed below:

List of blogs offering Technorati Favorites’ Exchange programmes:

1. NiaTrading Signals – Alex 3071
2. Domestic Divapalooza – Angela Llewellyn Stevens
3. Anitokid by Anitokid –
4. AskaX World – Andika Kusuma
5. Tech Lock Rahul – Rahul
6. Bigfoot Sightings – Linda Martin
7. Azazil.net – Gary V. Vaughan
8. Nukilan Jejari Azhad by Shaz Azhad –
9. Fyais by fyais –
10. BlogOp – Chris Lodge
11. Design Adaptations – Charity Ondriezek
12. Spyware, Adware and Security News
13. Digital Information Technology – Atul Dogra
14. How to Earn Money Blogging – Daryl Lau
15. Make Money Online: Quick n’ Easy Way – EJ Cooksey
16. Genius Type – Brian Lee
17. Keeping Fit is a Daily Battle
18. India PR Blog by India PR Blogspot –
19. The Rojak Blog – Ap0gEE
20. Lifecruiser – Lifecruiser
21. Me and My Net – Anoop Kumar Singh
22. Manila Mom – Maia Jose
23. MLM Gossip
24. Panda Cube – Aki Jinn
25. Quasi Fictional – Diogenes
26. Shankar’s Tech Blog 2.0 – Shankar
27. ShanKri-La – Karthik Ramadoss
28. Share Everything in Life
29. Dox – Rahul
30. My Online Collections by star500k –
31. Table4Five – Elizabeth
32. TechChee.com
33. Ordinary Folk – Mike
34. (weeding done to here)
35. T Jantunen.com by T Jantunen –
36. Vinod Live! by Vinod Ponmanadiyil –
37. Online Business News – Tammy Ames
38. Wampago – Chris
39. Webtools@Desinet1
40. Show Me The Money by Gerri –
41. Armen’s Blog – Fave it
42. Article Discovery Politics by David Greene –
43. Philippine Home Design and Improvement Blog
44. Home Based Business by Brian Pratt –
45. Shakeroo’s Gold – Shakeroo
46. Blue Sky Brothers – Greg Meares
47. Brown Thoughts by Brown Baron –
48. Business Sanity – Susan Martin
49. CalvinWarr.com by Calvin Warr –
50. Can’t Coach That by Coach McGee –
51. Career Ramblings – Fave the Site
52. The Pond – Karen
53. ContentPays.info by Yogesh –
54. Creative Design – David Airey
55. Random Expressions – Deepak Jeswal
56. Digital Phocus – Brendan Monaghan
57. Dosh Dosh – Fave it
58. Eat Drink & Be Merry – Fave it
59. Ed Lau – Fave it
60. eJabs.com by Matthew Jabs –
61. Everyday Weekender – Fave it
62. (exceptional) work.com – Jon
63. Life in the Fast Lane by Deborah –
64. Foreign Perspectives by Arnold –
65. Gauravonomics by Gaurav –
66. Hannes Johnson – Fave it
67. Ramblings from the Marginalized – Fave the Site
68. Homemaker Diary – MQ
69. Internet Serious Business by The Troll –
70. iReview – iReview
71. JesterTunes – Jester
72. Jimi Morrisons Head – Fave it
73. Jon Lee – Fave it
74. Julies Journal – Fave it
75. Kabatology – Kabatology
76. Klamath Design by Linda –
77. Sleeping Princess
78. MLM Forums online marketing blog by Jens P. Berge –
79. MrGaryLee.com by Gary Lee –
80. Msdanielle.com by Danielle –
81. My Dandelion Patch – Fave it
82. Nate Whitehill – Fave it
83. Nathan Drach – Fave it
84. Net Business Blog – Fave the Site
85. Life Rocks! 2.0 by Nirmal T V –
86. Real Amber – Real Amber
87. Reality Wired – James
88. Revvi::blog – Revvi Sudirnoputra
89. Riskiraj by Rishiraj –
90. Romance Tracker by Phil Van Treuren –
91. Samanathon – Fave it
92. Scribble on the Wall – Fave it
93. Serendipity by Sharique–
94. Shadow Scope by Richard –
95. SiteLogic – Fave it
96. Sizlopedia – Sizlopedia
97. SMO Blog – Mark Blair
98. SMS Today by Foxtucker–
99. Square Cookies – Square Cookies
100. SquareCookies
101. Stephen Fung – Fave it
102. Syaf the Geek by Syafrizal Abu Mansor –
103. TechLivez.com – Tech Livez
104. Technacular by Vikas Sah –
105. TechnoDiary – Sahil Gupta
106. Technospot.net by Ashish Mohta –
107. TeknoBites by Ram –
108. The Blog Columnist – The Blog Columnist
109. Filipino Entrepreneur by Filipino Entrepreneur –
110. The Thinking Blog by ilker yoldas –
111. Untwisted Vortex – RT Cunningham
112. UrgentClick by Andy –
113. Vacilamos! – Ari
114. Online Diary – Venu
115. VersaCreations by Vivienne Quek –
116. My Affiliate Journey
117. Inklings: The Copywriter’s Blog by Walter Burek –
118. My Life My Story –My Passion – Yong Kai Loon
119. Zath by Simon Barker –
120. Digital Art World Blog –
121. Blogtology –
122. The Outsider’s View – Javier Altman
123. Making Money through Internet – MarriedMelody
124. Earn Money on the Web – Kent
125. Blogs et IE – T@Blogoshere
126. Spark Minute – David Spark
127. Uncleboob – Uncleboob *
128. IT Experts Central – IT Experts Central *
129. Tech Freak – Kanak *
130. sophistishe – Sheena *

SUGGESTION: once you’ve gone through and faved everyone on this list, add a comment saying you’ve done that and subscribe to the comments. That’ll pick up anyone new appearing here. ‘Tis also worthwhile to run up a favourites exchange page of your own; if you do, mention that here and I’ll add you on which get’s both of us a link. 

IMPORTANT: I’m running various separate blog promotions at the moment so you need to put a comment here to say that you’ve favourited me as I can’t tell from the Technorati info whether or not new favourites are arriving because of this post.

TRAVEL/EXPAT/IMMIGRATION/EMMIGRATION RELATED SITES: let me know if your blog covers topics in the areas of travel, expat or immigration/emmigration matters as I will consider blogroll exchanges with sites in those areas.

WEEDING: a number of those listed here are no longer participating in the exchange; I’m in the process of weeding out those that aren’t so this list will be shrinking drastically over the next few days weeks months.

LINK BACK: As I have dofollow for comments, you should automatically get a linkback to your blog when I approve any comments written here. I’d appreciate it if you’d return the favour 🙂

Initially we just included our blog on the marketing lists for our other sites but quite quickly found out that a lot of places list blogs in a peculiar way or don’t list them at all so we’ve been looking around for other ways to get our blog known.The business of blogging is relatively new and so a lot of places aren’t quite sure what to do with them. Many site directories are set up on the basis that the sites on them are fairly static but that’s one thing that’s definitely not the case with active blogs. They also have the characteristic of being local news in many cases and whilst I’m sure it’ll be quite a while before we get mentioned on a news bulletin we are actually listed on one service which in turn feeds into Reuters, USA Today and FoxNews.

If you go by the signs, they are open from as early as 8am to as late as 11pm or so. However, if you try to order a meal it’s a very different story. The most common times are from about 11am to 10pm but in practice almost all such restaurants only serve food from noon to 1.30pm and from about 7.30pm to 9pm. Even the French fast-food chain Quick only serves its full menu a little bit outside the noon to 2pm period so you can’t even have a burger at 3pm if you wanted one unless you go to McDonalds.We still get caught out by those hours. A coffee-shop (salon du thé) opened recently in Estagel and we’ve been meaning to try it out for ages. We were running a little behind schedule on Sunday so thought that it would be a good time to get a sandwich or something from them as they had a sign saying that they opened from noon ’til 10pm. What happened when we turned up at 3pm? The waitress came out and said that they weren’t serving meals until the evening. The funny thing is that we were their only customers that day so the five staff will once again be sitting almost all day doing nothing. In fact, we’ve only ever seen the staff inside so perhaps we were their first ever customers.Perhaps we’ll be more lucky with the kebab shop but somehow I can’t see it.

This is one area of 21st century living where France is at best in the 20th century and quite often in the 19th, particularly if you’re a foreigner. As you drive through France, that just about every petrol station of any consequence advertises itself as 24/7. If you look at the small print, you’ll find that outside the normal hours of about 8am to noon and 2pm to about 8pm these stations are automated. Fair enough, after all France is quite rural and a lot of these stations don’t get a lot of business outside normal working hours. The snag is that when they’re automated you almost always have to have a French debit card to use them so they’re not really 24/7 if you’re a foreigner.

This sort-of 24/7 service applies to many things in France. For instance, we recently had a problem with our electricity on a Sunday afternoon. We weren’t expecting to get any help from the local electricans as it’s virtually impossible to get them to do anything as regular readers will know so we thought that we’d try calling those advertising themselves as 24/7. It turns out that the expression “24/7” in France means that they have an answering machine switched on outside normal working hours and don’t actually do any work at the weekend. One consequence of this is that there’s a bit of a backlog of work needing to be done each Monday. As a result, none of the electricians that we called at the weekend arrived ’til after the work had been done by a very competent Dutch electrician on Monday morning.

Happy Halloween!

October was relatively quiet on the hotel front ’til this weekend which is a holiday in both France & Spain so we were completely full from Friday to Sunday night.

I’ve been tidying up the various websites that we run and improving their search rankings. The combination of improvements on the main hotel page (www.mascamps.com) has given us a 10 fold increase in the number of hits so far. The equivalent changes are in the works for www.ourinns.org which is already moving up the rankings and we’re making about $50 a month now on the advertising on it and the related www.chambre-dhote.org (in French) and the self-catering equivalent, www.ourgites.org .

Separately from those developments, I thought I’d see if we could more directly make a few bob on the transport arrangements people make and registered www.perpignanflightsandcarhire.com which is starting to get a sensible search engine ranking though it’s got a long way to go. If you’re booking any travel yourself, you’ll find the cheapest car hire in the Perpignan area (no, reallY: I checked them all) and, I think, in Europe, worldwide flights on discount and normal airlines, the Heathrow & Stansted express tickets and even ferries. We’ve already made about half the start-up costs of this in commissions which is pretty good going I think.

More as somewhere to hang our affiliate links than anything else at present, we’ve also got www.personallychosen.com which has quite an assortment of things on it. All the above travel things but also some financial links and even La Senza. In due course, we’re planning to use it to sell some of the photos that we’ve taken for the website as prints and for a few other items that people have asked us about. Basically, it’s intended to be our main non-mascamps website. If you buy any stuff online, let me know where from and I’ll see if we can get a link for it (if you ask nicely, I will probably split the commission with you).

Started experimenting again with e-bay which is a dead cheap way to advertise. Costs just 15p for 10 days which has picked up around 40 views on average although no direct sales. We’re not that bothered about the direct sales this tiME: last year we had one, slightly lossmaking, direct sale but pulled in getting on for EUR 1000 in indirect bookings over the following 9 months attracted by our ebay ads.